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Christmastime should offer many special opportunities: reconnecting with family and friends, ruminating on the idea of peace on earth, reflecting on a Savior’s entrance into this plane of existence.
Making bad puns into album titles should not be one of those opportunities. When it came time for naming their first, full-fledged Christmas project, wiser heads within the framework that is Third Day prevailed.
“I was kicking around the title of ‘On The Third Day of Christmas,’ but I was outvoted,” says bassist Tai Anderson.
Instead, the five-man band from Atlanta returned to a time-honored (for them, anyway), yet potent approach for creating and naming their Christmas effort. Fusing familiar classics with original songs, and studio tracks with live performances, Third Day offers up their unique blend of gutsy, yet sensitive music tailor-made for the season.
It’s the perfect time for Christmas Offerings.
Through a ten-plus year career, spanning studio albums, concert videos, sold-out stadium shows, national awards and two previous entries in the Offerings series, Third Day has never been willing to settle for the status quo. The partnership of vocalist/guitarist Mac Powell, guitarists Mark Lee and Brad Avery, bassist Anderson and drummer David Carr has long bolstered the idea of driving, spirit-filled rock and roll, while remaining true to the members’ internal search for truth and relationship, both earthly and heavenly.
With the release of Christmas Offerings, you see the curtains of their lives pulled back a bit, giving us a glimpse of the Christmas songs that meant so much to them growing up, as well as using four new tracks to tell contemporary stories that cast them in their off-stage roles as husbands, fathers, friends and men of God.
And in turning to the hybrid style of music-making the Offerings series allows, you see the Christmas season from so many musical angles, a situation that keeps the process interesting for music-maker and music-lover alike.
“In the past eighteen months, so many people have asked us when we were going to record a Christmas project,” Powell says. “All of us are excited about the new direction we have taken with these classic Christmas songs as well as these new Christmas ‘offerings’ we have written.”
“I think the Offerings records are interesting because right from the start we established something, with half of it being live and half of it being covers, which we really hadn’t done on the studio records,” Anderson says. “This time around, as we were looking at a Christmas project, the thought was, ‘How do we approach this within the context of the Offerings series?’”
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